Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
A/N: This is for the glorious and magnificent and wonderful Ellie (with the monsters). It is for her birthday, which was last month, and it is terribly late because I am awful at deadlines. But I hope that you enjoy it regardless!
Also, there is a fair amount of angst ahead. (This is me writing Lily/Teddy. Of course there is.) This is a storyline I've been working around in my head since I first started writing fics ages and ages ago, so I may have tried to do too much, and therefore accomplished too little, but I really hope that is not the case. Fingers crossed it turned out all right, because Ellie truly deserves the best.
when you have a heart that beats
Teddy's best friend is named Quentin Robertson, and he is a bastard. Teddy has known this since he and Quentin first met in Potions class, when Quentin told a group of Slytherins that if they stirred their purple potion counter-clockwise it would turn green but still work just as well. In fact, it turned red and exploded. The Slytherins were sent to the hospital wing, and Quentin claimed the title of Gryffindor Idiot/God of Hogwarts, depending on whom you were talking to.
So Teddy has never been surprised by Quentin's occasional cruelties; he accepts both his beautiful disregard for anything approaching order and his callous attitude about almost everything. But they have been best friends for sixteen years before Teddy realises that somehow that "almost everything" has come to include him. And maybe Quentin isn't even aware of how much his actions upset Teddy, but to Quentin, Lily is Teddy's little sister and so he still has to know that this is not okay.
This being: Lily sitting on the desk at the front of the Potions classroom—Quentin's classroom, Professor Robertson's classroom—with Quentin standing in front of her, her bare ankles hooked behind his legs, her hands on his back—one on his shoulder, the other with fingers caught in Quentin's hair—her lips, although Teddy can't tell from where he's standing, exactly, undoubtedly on Quentin's. Her tongue probably on his as well. They're moving slowly, and soft, indecent noises hang in the cool air of the dungeon. This is not a rushed thing; this is something practised, something familiar. It makes Teddy's head buzz.
He coughs. The sound is a gunshot in the classroom, and the two of them break apart, Quentin leaping around with a guilty but pleading expression already twisting his face. Lily tugs the front of her shirt down and brings the ends of her silver and green tie together instinctively, although that does little to camouflage the fact that the first three buttons on her shirt have been undone, revealing enough skin to keep Teddy sleepless for months.
"Teddy." Quentin has never sounded this nervous. And Teddy takes that to mean that he knows that this is unacceptable, was aware of it when he started snogging his seventeen year-old student. Lily Potter.
Quentin straightens his back as he faces his friend, hands stuck in his pockets, not attempting to disguise the way his own untucked shirt falls open. His voice is less shaky as he continues, "I told you I'd meet you in Hogsmeade."
"I got finished with my meeting early. Thought I'd come down and see your professorly digs." He's resolutely not looking at Lily. He wants to give her the chance to put herself back together, and he doesn't want her to see the way he's burning with jealousy. "Apparently," he says, because this whole thing feels wrong, "they're not so much professorly as—"
"Don't," Quentin interrupts. "You have no right."
"I have no right?" Teddy snaps, and then Lily hops off the desk and comes forward, just one step and all of his attention is on her.
She's buttoned her shirt, but her tie is still undone, and her lips are swollen. Her gaze, as it lands on him, is reckless and brazen, and he's caught again, as he is every time he sees her, by the force of his heart pounding against his ribs; he's caught by an insane desire to be allowed to love Lily Potter.
"I'm of age," she says, like it matters. He would still be feeling this way if she were thirty and he and Quentin were forty—it's not about age, it's about the way his world sits around her.
Teddy sticks his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking. "Whatever," he says. He looks at Quentin and adds, "It's your career."
"Teddy," Quentin digs, as he turns to leave, "you're not going to tell, are you?"
"Of course not." Above all else, he's jealous that the taboos surrounding this haven't stopped the two of them. He's upset at the clear evidence that Lily is nowhere near shy about breaking the rules—she could have had him so many times and here she is, snogging his best friend, looking at Teddy like he's breaking something important.
"Why not?"
Teddy's almost out the door before he responds. "It's whatever, Q. You're my best friend." He glances over his shoulder, keeps his voice indifferent. "Lily's right, she is of age." To him it sounds weak, but they might accept it. "I'll meet you in Hogsmeade. You guys," he waves a hand, "whatever," he repeats, because he wants to hit Quentin for being so cruel and to kiss Lily for being so unbearably difficult to stop loving, and he needs to get out of there. But as he leaves he does add, "Please don't let this fuck up your lives."
:::
The next time he sees Lily is in late August, at Hugo's birthday party. The air smells faintly burnt, rough on his lungs as he stands beside James and Rose and Victoire by the edge of the garden, half-listening as they argue over whether it's better to douse everyone with water balloons before or after they start eating. He's firmly on the side of never, but he doesn't tell them that—he's too busy staring across the twisted mess of a garden at Lily to defend his opinion.
She's with Hugo and Fred and Dom, but she's looking back at Teddy. He can't even make out the blue of her eyes from where he's standing, but he can read that she's challenging him in the way they're narrowed, in the way she's thrown back her shoulders and has one knee bent, like she could fly or fight.
He doesn't want to fight and he doesn't want her to run away. He lifts a hand in hello and pretends to turn his attention to the conversation, which has moved on to whether it would be a good idea to add a few dung bombs to the mix. Honestly, he wonders sometimes whether anyone in this family will ever grow up. From the way George is tossing Roxie's squealing daughter into the air, he doesn't think so.
He catches Lily's eye later that night, as Hugo laughs over a stack of books from one of the Scamander twins—he imagines that they're actually something else, much less acceptable, disguised as books for Hermione's sake—and Lily returns his smile, just for an instant, before her expression hardens and she turns away. For that brief moment things feel ordinary, but the way the moment breaks makes Teddy worry that maybe Lily will never forgive him for walking in on her and Quentin. He's afraid that she seems to have decided that an unspoken goodbye is the best answer to the awkwardness of that confrontation. He's afraid that a part of him thinks she's right.
:::
The next time he speaks to Lily is at Christmastime, and he says, "Happy Christmas, Lil," and she says, "You too," and kisses him on the cheek. But she is drunk and shining and happy, burning up with Firewhiskey and the touch of all the Potter-Weasley cousins and all their friends and glowing—fucking bursting—with the white fairy-lights strung around James's flat. She is all of that, and Teddy is quiet and tired, and he knows the kiss and the words mean nothing.
:::
"You hate me, you do!" Another drunken night, in the middle of summer, in the middle of London, an unexpected meeting in a popular pub and he hates the way she's standing in the middle of the street like a car could come and she'd be happy about it.
"Lily," he says. He can see Hugo and Bea and Ris on the opposite corner, just waiting for her to scream herself out so they can take her home. But he doesn't want to wait, he wants to uncover this two-year-old drama and tell her she's an idiot, that he only cares because it was Quentin and not him. But he can feel Ris's eyes on him, and he knows if he says anything she'll curse him. He knows she's looking out for Lily, and he's grateful for it, but he wants to say so much to Lily and there's enough alcohol in his blood for tonight to seem like a nice night for confessions, if only she would stop screaming at him.
"And you judge me, every time you see me, you judge me. Just like everyone else. You know what my first thought was, that day? I thought, finally, Teddy sees me like the rest of the world does." The words are broken and high and it sounds like she's speaking with more than the force of her unbearably small body. Like she's so loud the fucking moon could hear her.
Teddy shakes his head. He shakes it again and again, until his eyes are a blur of yellow streetlights and neon signs and dark night, and then he says, "You're an idiot," and just like that she snaps.
She throws her head back and laughs and laughs. Then she turns and runs out of the street, grabs onto Bea's hands and shouts back at him, back at the moon, "You are, too." She and her friends move down the opposite side of the street and he feels a sick anxiety settle beneath the warmth of alcohol, close to his bones. He thinks that may have been their verbal goodbye.
:::
He's mostly right. He sees Lily at family parties over the next few years, waves at her if he somehow passes her in London, buys her coffee if he runs into her in a Starbucks or a Costa, but mostly she and he are two people whose paths sometimes cross for minutes, but never longer.
Every time he sees her he expects to feel nothing. But there's still the frisson of tension in his gut, the way his palms start sweating and his heart beats faster in response to her voice, to her presence, to the occasional smiles she directs at other people.
He keeps waiting to fall out of love with her. By his thirty-second birthday he's wondering if it's even a possibility, or if when he fell in love with her, he broke something important and got caught forever.
He could suffer a worse fate than an eternity of unrequited love, but on maudlin nights, when he sits in his kitchen with a bottle of Firewhiskey listening to the saddest songs he knows, he has a hard time coming up with anything worse.
One night he thinks that maybe being loved back by Lily, broken the way she was when she shouted at him from the centre lines of the road, that might be worse. But he decides that Lily's love would temper the way her sadness would dig at him, and, besides, she might be better. Better than he is, at any rate, he admits as he stares into the half-empty bottle of golden liquid and drops his head to the table. Much better.
:::
Then comes the time he sees her out of context and it takes him a moment—such a small, short blink of his eyes—to recognise her. She stumbles out of the Floo entrance in the St. Mungo's waiting room just as Teddy and the most recent addition to his lycanthropy research project are coming in from a head-clearing walk, and he stares at her, red hair frizzy and falling from a bun, skin pale but flushed at her neck and her wrists, eyes vague and glassy, and then his mouth says, "Lily?" before his mind has even admitted that it's her.
He leaves his patient by the first row of seats and crosses the room to catch her as she collapses a few steps from the fireplace. Her skin is hot, so hot, and he stares at her pale eyelids and the red lashes that brush her cheeks and he thinks, oddly, that he's never been this close to her when she's this unaware of him.
And then there are other healers around him, Levitating her from his arms and onto a stretcher. He stares at her, repeats, "Lily," and his friend Yvonne squeezes his hand.
"Lily Potter, yeah?" she says. "We'll take her up, Ted. You take Chris back to his wing. I'll let you know where she is."
"Will you call her parents?" he asks, allowing her to push him back towards Chris, who is watching them with an interested look on his young face. It's the first time he's looked interested in anything since he came in after he was bitten, and it would excite Teddy if Teddy weren't so worried about Lily.
Yvonne finds him after he leaves Chris in the lycanthropy wing's common room, along with a few of the other people in the program. She tells him, her voice soft in the white hallway by the lift, "It was a snake bite. A bad one. Yellow-tailed sand-winder. Not something we usually find around here."
"Do you have the anti-venom?" he asks, because the cause is only immediately relevant if the cure isn't there.
"Of course."
"Well, then, she'll be fine." He's pushing Yvonne with his tone; the words come out hard and forceful and he can see her surprise in the tiny step she takes away from him. This short but powerful anger isn't how his stress usually manifests. He is a good healer, he is one of the bests, even considering his chosen specialty—lycanthropy requires calm and understanding and patience, and Teddy usually has all of that in loads, even on full moons. But right now he's not reacting normally, because this isn't normal. Lily isn't meant to be here.
"It'll take a week, maybe longer," Yvonne soldiers on, and most days Teddy would admire the way her voice stays soft even as his is grinding deep and raw. "It was a vicious bite, and she didn't exactly get here in a timely manner. It would help," she sighs, because he's glaring at her, "Teddy," she glances around, and then whispers, "please calm the fuck down."
They're alone in the hallway, and just moments ago he caught Lily as she collapsed, and so he thinks he's entitled to a massive freak out. But Yvonne has her teeth in her lower-lip and she's crossed her arms over her stomach; she looks the way she does when she has to deliver bad news to a patient. The familiar sight of Yvonne's anxiety stirs something equally familiar in Teddy, and he takes a deep breath.
"Okay," he says, after a moment. "Okay."
Yvonne nods. It's short and brisk, all business, sending her hair swinging over her cheek. "I contacted her family. Her parents are coming to see her tonight; her brothers said they'd be in tomorrow morning. Mr and Mrs Potter probably won't get here straight away, though—they still have to sign in, despite their celebrity, so I'll let you up, if you want to see her?"
"Yeah, that would be good," he says. "Lead the way."
"Don't freak out," she tells him, pressing the button for the lift and waving him inside. "Please. She doesn't seem very calm, herself. Letting you up there is against my better judgement." She pushes the button for the seventeenth floor and Teddy bites the inside of his cheek.
"What did you say bit her?"
"Yellow-tailed side-winder. It's a very, very rare snake. She won't say where she found it."
"Or it found her?" he suggests, because sinister plots and snakes just go together.
"Don't lose your mind, Teddy," Yvonne warns.
The doors slide open and she leads him through a pair of swinging doors to a white-walled, white-tiled hallway. She nods at the second door to the left and says, "I'll bring her parents up when they get here."
Teddy walks through the open door to see Lily sitting up in bed, looking pale, even against the white pillow and sheets, and staring at the gauze on her arm like it's entranced her.
"A side-winder, huh?" He says, reaching for inane as he comes to stand beside her bed. "Hear those are rare."
She looks up at him, eyes a sharp blue, now, challenging him, edged in red-lined white and bursting with something he does not understand.
"I'm a parseltongue," and she says it like it's the worst thing in the world. "They never bite me."
He sits down.
She keeps talking, fast, "I've never told you that because I don't want my parents to know because those memories, they hurt them so much, they must, you know? But I am. And it's all I do, I go around and break into old wizarding homes for the fucking government, for the underbelly of the Ministry—I'm in so deep, in such a dark place I don't think my dad even knows about it—all those old homes with black histories, they've all got charms laid on thick, so thick, Ted. And they're all guarded by something—animals or statues or crazy monsters. You wouldn't even believe some of the shit we've come across. I'm valuable because I can talk to snakes. A lot of these places have snakes guarding them—they incapacitate intruders without mauling them, they're good when you want to know who's breaking into your house. But usually I can talk them down. Usually they're in my pocket—literally, actually—by the time I'm done searching a house. Not this one." She snorts, a derisive noise. "These families must be getting wise to the fact that a parseltongue is searching them out. They're getting wise to me." Her right hand, the one that's not attached to the swollen skin around the bandage and its hidden bite, squeezes into the sheets by her leg. Teddy reaches out and places his hand over hers. She shakes him off.
"But you're a bartender." He feels stupid. He can't help his imagination from spiralling Lily's voice into a hiss, a high sound like a sigh and windy nights; the thought gives him chills, but they're not unpleasant as they move down his spine.
"On weekends." Her voice is timid and sad, like the rushed confession was a mistake, as she says, "Don't tell my parents."
"I would never." He means it. "But, Lily, Harry is a parseltongue."
"It's from Voldemort," she spits out, the sound vibrating with anger and self-loathing. This is a bloody cut, one that's festered straight to her heart.
He shakes his head. "He never," he begins, but then there are voices in the hall, and Lily's parents rush into the room, stopping just short of suffocating her with their hugs.
"He's never," he murmurs again, hoping Lily understands, beneath the crush of her parents, that Teddy means that Harry has never cared where something's come from, only what it's used for.
From the way she smiles as her parents pull away and says, "Just ran into it on the tube, I swear I have the worst luck," he thinks she really doesn't understand anything.
:::
Lily isn't alone once for the next two days. Teddy stops by sometimes, chats with her cousins and brothers, aunts and uncles and parents, and then returns to the relative calm of the lycanthropy wing. Lily burns with a curse-like tension that leaves him feeling exhausted, even when the others are there, and he can't work out why it is that he seems to be the only one who can feel it, whether it's because she's nervous about him or because he's so attuned to her.
He comes to see her late three nights after she's been taken in, and he expects the room to be swarming with visitors, as usual. But she's alone, staring at a page halfway through a thick book. Her eyes aren't moving, though, so he knows she's not actually reading.
He swallows. The sound is noisy in the silence of the room and Lily stiffens. She glances at him, then back at the book. "Hey."
"Hi. No one else is here, then?"
"I sent them all away." She shrugs, the oversized t-shirt she's wearing slipping further down one freckled shoulder. "I needed some quiet."
"Oh." He's still standing by the doorway. "I can leave, too, if you want." The words come out short and hesitanhe t; doesn't want to leave, he hopes she knows that.
"You can stay. I think I should probably..." she sighs. "I've been thinking a lot lately. Not really much time for anything else."
Teddy nods. He sits in the plastic chair by her bed and interrupts. "Lily, the last couple of times we've been together, alone, or mostly alone, I mean, you've done the talking."
"Right," she says. The word is a breath of frustration.
"Did it ever occur to you that I might have something to say, too?"
She turns her head to stare at him. "I thought you'd said everything you wanted to back at school."
"No." He laughs. He can't help it. "Is all this," he waves a hand, "this...antagonism about that? About you snogging Quentin?"
She blinks, her fingers scrabbling on the sheets like she wants to dig her way out. "It bothered you," she accuses. "You can't pretend it didn't."
He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees and places his chin in his hands. "Of course it did. Not for the reasons you think, though. Not because I was judging you—what's ten years, what are rules—nothing like that ever mattered for you, Lily. I knew you then, knew you well enough to know that if you wanted something you'd go for it, fuck the consequences. It just surprised me that you'd want Quentin."
"Because he was my professor, because it was wrong?" She forms the word like it tastes strange, bitter and familiar at once.
"Because he was my friend," and that sounds jealous, but she's too far inside herself to notice.
"Made it awkward for you, did I?" From vulnerable to defensive in a heartbeat, this has always been Lily.
"You didn't." He sighs, fists his hands in his hair. He thinks. "Fuck, Lily, it mattered at the time but it stopped mattering after I left, don't you see? I was surprised and a little hurt, because you were—are—important and he was important and the two of you together shocked me, but not because I thought it was wrong, or anything. I never judged you, not for a minute. You've been reacting to it like it matters, like it's even there, all this time—but it's not. It doesn't affect how I've always seen you."
"How can you be so blind?" she murmurs, the words so soft he wouldn't have caught them if he weren't leaning so close to her.
"I'm not," he protests. "I am not blind, not about you."
"Yeah? You didn't even think—what about the parseltongue?" The words hang sharp. Like a challenge. Like she expects him to back away from her.
He shrugs. "I don't see why it's a huge secret, to be honest." She makes a noise like a groan. "Does anyone know, other than the people you work with?"
"Al and Louis and James." So she has lifelines, although they aren't the ones he'd expect. Albus, maybe—the two have always been close, but James and she fight as often as they get on, and when they get on they are usually mocking Roxie or Lucy. Louis was strange, too, bright like the rest, but more difficult to get a hold on—he had once kissed Teddy at a Christmas party and then told Lily the next day that he'd make a great shag, an ordeal which had embarrassed Teddy and thrilled Lily and amused Louis to the point of tears.
"Do they care?" he asks. It's important to him that they don't.
"They think it would hurt Dad to know how I handled it."
"By keeping it a secret, you mean?" he asks.
"And," she begins, but then shakes her head. "Yes, by keeping it a secret."
"Can't you tell him now?"
"But I don't want to, Teddy. I don't want him to know. Especially not now. Especially not—after this." Her hand settles on the bandage. The skin around it is less swollen, but she still winces as her hand falls on the gauze. "They'd be worried, all the time, if they knew what I was doing. I can't make them worry."
"So instead you run into venomous snakes on the tube and serve alcohol?"
"Precisely," she says. Her lips are, improbably, curving into a smile. "I tell the worst lies, don't I?"
"They could be better," he admits. "Do you remember when you first got Sorted into Slytherin and Scorpius Malfoy tried to teach you how to lie?"
"He failed miserably," she laughs, "I should blame my whole life on him."
"Or maybe just the recent years," Teddy agrees. Lily smiles at him, and something tight in his chest lets go.
:::
The next night he brings her a cup of coffee from the Starbucks across the street from St. Mungo's. She looks like she's never seen anything so beautiful.
"What they serve here is more like mud than coffee," she complains as she takes the paper cup from his hand. "And you are now officially my favourite."
He knows she's joking, but the words thrill him anyway.
:::
She has nightmares sometimes. He shouldn't know this, but sometimes he takes a trip up to her floor in the middle of the night, on the off chance she's still awake, and finds her thrashing in her bed.
Usually one of the other healers, ones actually assigned to Lily, rush in and wake her up. A few nights, though, they're with other patients, and it's left to Teddy to wake her up.
Most of his patients suffer nightmares, so it's not a strange thing for him to gently say someone's name, to attempt applying brief pressure to shaking shoulders until the person wakes up. Doing it for Lily is different.
Not because it's her; waking people up from nightmares is an action that is so familiar to Teddy that he could do it to anyone and it wouldn't be strange. What's different is the way Lily wakes up. She opens her eyes slowly, and they're always so wet that when she blinks in the light, a few tears roll down her cheeks. And then she sighs and shuts them totally again, and falls asleep without ever truly regaining consciousness. She never seems to remember the nightmares and the awakening in the morning.
He wonders, sometimes, what her head does to her when she's asleep, but he mostly thinks he doesn't want to know.
:::
Lily is discharged eleven days after she was admitted, and she seems perfectly healthy as she packs her bag and steps from St. Mungo's. The bite has left two pale circles on her arm, but otherwise she appears unchanged. Teddy feels immediately lonely as he watches her leave with her parents. He has a whole wing full of werewolves and a hospital full of co-workers and friends, but for a little while he had Lily, too, and although he feels selfish for thinking it, a part of him wishes she could have stayed for longer.
But, of course, he reminds himself as he returns to his patients, it is a good thing that she is healthy enough to go home. And to return to her terribly dangerous job and her terribly segmented life and her horrible way of looking at the world like it's not meant for her. All of those thoughts sound bitter in his head, but he doesn't think they're very far off from the truth.
Later that day he gets called to the swinging doors that mark the Authorised Personnel Only part of the wing and sees James standing there, his hands in his pockets and his lower-lip rolled between his teeth.
"Hey, Ted. Care to get lunch?"
"Sure, just let me—" but James looks nervous, so he stops and says, "Actually, I'll do it later. Here." He shrugs out of his white coat and drapes it over his arm—he'll drop it by laundry on their way out, it needs a good washing—and gestures for James to lead the way.
They go to a Muggle cafe two buildings over, and James orders soup and then spends ten minutes picking up a noodle with his spoon and watching it slide back into the broth before he says, "Look, I know how you feel about Lily."
Teddy spits a bit of egg sandwich onto his plate.
"It's obvious, mate. To me, I mean. And Al. Possibly to Rose, too, although she's too nice to say anything." He tilts his head, considering. "Also Dom, but she's too mean to say anything, on the off chance it would work out." Which may be true. It bothers Teddy that this all comes so simply from James's mouth.
He decides denial is probably useless. "What does it matter how I feel about her?"
James rubs the side of his nose. "It doesn't. It's good, I mean. Well, actually, considering how Lily is, it probably sucks for you, but it's good for her, because she needs—because you love her enough to let her be, and that is really, really good. Except that she's—I just wanted to talk to you."
"Okay." Teddy draws out the word. He can't think of anything else to say. This conversation seems so far outside the realm of possibility that they may as well be having it in space.
"I wanted to talk to you about the first day she talked to a snake. She was a fourth year, so I was in seventh. She was always getting into trouble, she—well, you know Lily. That's how she was."
That's how you all were, Teddy wants to say, but doesn't, because James is staring at him in determination and to interrupt him now would be rude.
"But that day, she went above and beyond. She went to the Forest on her own—it was the aloneness that was unusual, not that she went—and came across some sort of common snake. She didn't know what sort it was, but she said it definitely wasn't magic. And it talked to her, and she talked back. She did it without thinking she said, like it was something...innate, something inside her that had just wanted to get out. And she left and came back to the castle and nobody saw her for two days."
James pauses for long enough that Teddy feels that he should fill the silence. "Where was she?"
James shakes his head. "I still don't know. She showed up two days later and she seemed perfectly normal. No one could get her to say where she'd gone, but, honestly, Lily was secretive even then, so none of us worried very much."
Teddy nods and waits. The silence stretches, but this time he lets it. James stirs his soup and then looks up again and continues, "But then, two months after the fact, I'm looking at the Marauders' Map, and I see Lily all alone in a hidden alcove on the fourth floor. Lily being alone is still, at this point, unusual, and for her to be up there—nearer Gryffindor than Slytherin—it was weird. So I went to find out what was wrong."
"And?"
"And she was sitting in the middle of this alcove on the floor. She had a biro out and she had tally marks all down her arm. And it was the scariest thing I have ever seen, the way she was methodically drawing them into her skin. I have never, never in my life, wanted more badly to be away from a place. Lily is my sister and I love her, but I did not want to deal with her like that. I couldn't—" he stares into the cold soup and continues, his voice steady, "but of course, I had to."
Teddy can see it, can see Lily broken like that. It's easy, and it's terrifying how easy it is, to picture her that sad.
"What was she doing?" he asks, his voice soft.
"I asked that. I asked, 'What are you doing?,' asked it like I was talking to a frightened animal. She didn't even look up. She put down the pen, pointed at the first mark, and said, 'This is for the time I pushed you off the rocking chair and didn't feel bad, even though you were bleeding,' and then the next, 'This is when I told Albus his fish had died, when he hadn't,' and she kept going, listing off all these stupid things from our childhood, and then she gets to the last few and says, 'This is for liking someone I shouldn't,' and then, 'This is for Slytherin,' and then, God, 'This is for talking to snakes.' And then she dug her nail in there, so deep I could tell it must have hurt, could see it even from where I was standing."
"What was she doing?" Teddy asks, again, because his heart has stuttered and he cannot rationalise any of this.
"She called it accounting. I called it sick, although I didn't say that to her at the time. She was just...she was listing all the reasons that she was a bad person, that's what she said. All the reasons she had to hate herself."
"Christ," Teddy drops his head into his hands. Lily's sadness sinks inside him, heavy and spreading. "What on earth—what did you say to her?" He would have wanted to shake her, to tell her how she was wrong, but surely that's not the right way to respond.
"I sat next to her and cast a cleaning charm on her skin, which was wrong, because her hand went scrabbling for the pen again. But I told her that she was—that she was human, that's all. That everyone had problems. That I had cheated on my girlfriend, and sure, that meant I had done a bad thing, but not that I was a bad person." He sighs. "She didn't really respond. And then I asked her about the talking-to-snakes-thing, and she told me about that day in the Forest, and I asked her why she thought it was so bad, and she said that it meant she had some of Voldemort in her. I pointed out that if that was true, then Dad did, too, and she told me, 'He vanquished him,' like that made a huge difference between their situations. I told her I was jealous, that I had always wanted to talk to snakes, and then she did it, spoke parseltongue, and it made me shiver a little, because it's weird, Ted, hearing your sister sound like that, and she said, 'See,' like I was afraid of her. Like she was afraid of her, too."
"And then what'd you do? What could you do?"
"Exactly," James says. "What could I do? I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know how to fix her. But she trusted me, and so I couldn't go to our parents or to anyone else—although looking back I wish I had. Now it's too late, I think. Back then, I sat with her, and after a while I told her I didn't think it mattered whether she could talk to snakes, I think it mattered what she decided to do with that skill. And then it became this—obsession, almost? A strange one, that only I knew about, at first. Albus found out soon after though, and then we told Louis one night, because Lily's always been his favourite. But she's obviously still not okay. Sometimes I see tally marks on her wrists, still, small ones near the thumb. She always tugs her shirt over them when she sees I notice them. She's—this is what I wanted you to know, Ted. I know you know her, I know you see she's hurting. But I wanted you to know that it's worse than even you think it is, that it's longer and it's deeper and it's a part of her now. And that's not to say she can't change, that she won't grow, that she won't become happier, but—you love her, and so you'll kill yourself for her. And maybe she'll let you. And maybe she won't, maybe she'll love you back and grow and be happier, maybe she will. But before you decide to try, I want you to think a lot."
"Do you think I'll hurt her more, when I try?" James is giving him permission to love Lily, and Lily doesn't look at him like poison anymore, which is practically permission in itself, and so of course he will see if she might love him back, love him somehow, even like him somehow.
James sighs. "I think she'll hurt you a lot, if you let her. I think you'll hurt yourself. I think you might help her. But you won't save her. She has to do that herself. And I believe she can, and of course you believe she can. But I want you to know we might be wrong."
"We won't. Lily's strong," he says.
"She's also very...humanly weak." James's voice burns with his sadness, a sense of despair borrowed straight from Lily. "Don't forget that."
"No. I couldn't." He's picturing tally marks on white skin, kiss-swollen lips, the way she screamed at him from the middle of the road. "She's got—like, paper skin. But she also has iron bones. I think those are stronger."
James's smile is exhausted, but there's hope caught in the corners of it.
:::
He invites Lily out to coffee a week later, sends a message via owl and waits for a response but doesn't get one. He goes to the coffee shop on Saturday morning, anyway, hoping that she'll show up despite her silence.
She's there before he is, and he gets there ten minutes before eleven, so she was apparently early. She smiles brightly when the bell in the door jingles to announce his arrival, like there was no doubt that she'd show up. Like she's not being purposefully difficult.
He orders them coffee before he sits with her, and when he hands it to her he notices that her hand is shaking, just the barest amount, and remembers what James had said the week before. He thinks maybe James was not only warning him; he was also telling him to be patient with Lily.
"How's life since the hospital?" he asks, cutting a croissant in half and scooting the larger half towards her.
"You know?" she shrugs. "It's actually been pretty okay." Her smile is tight, but it's real. "Surviving the bite has gotten me some weird cred around the office. Like the fact that even though I can talk to them I'm still in danger, and the fact that I'm still willing to go out there makes me even more of a badass."
He snorts. "Your office sounds a little mad."
"Well, it is. But you practically paint in blood for a living, so." The words could be harsh, but somehow they come out soft and admiring, like his vocation beats her vocation for creepiness, and that is a good thing.
"I don't," he argues.
"Right. You're with the werewolves." For some reason, over her stay in St. Mungo's, they'd never really talked about him. "How is that? I haven't ever asked you about it." She picks at the sleeve of her jumper, pulling loose a thread so she doesn't have to look at him. "Sorry. I can be a little selfish."
"We all can." He wants to stop the way she's unwinding her jumper, but the set of her shoulders tells him she's not ready for him to touch her, not even for his hand to fall over hers. "Working with werewolves is amazing and sad. We have so many people working on a cure, but every time someone seems to be getting close, something happens and it all turns wrong. I'm not really involved in that part, I just take care of the wolves, talk to them and treat them, when they need it, and make sure they understand that just because their lives are different that doesn't mean they're over. A lot of them come in so bad, so terribly unhappy, and most of them leave feeling better, more in control, at least. It ends up being sort of...not uplifting, but something like it."
"Do you worry about being bit?"
"On full moons, when I'm watching them, yeah. Usually I do. But I'd rather risk it and be there for them—they don't know at the time, but the next morning, when they ask us what happened and we're able to tell them, that means something."
"It would. That shows so much trust." She takes a sip of her coffee, and he waits for some of the tension to drop from her shoulders. It doesn't. She asks, "What would you do?"
"If I were bitten?" She nods. "I guess, just go on, you know? There's not much you can do, other than to accept it and continue living."
"You saying it like that makes it sound so simple. But it wouldn't be, would it? Even for you—that would change you." And then she snorts into the rim of her coffee cup and shakes her head. "Like, more than just physically, more than just once a month." She sounds hesitant, "Wouldn't it?"
"Definitely." Teddy wonders whether she knows him at all. "I would probably change completely. Although I can't think how, really."
"You'd probably get angry. Like, you'd always be angry, just under the surface. Normally you'd just be ordinary, easy Teddy, but for us—the people who know you—there'd be this undercurrent of, like, hardness. Angry hardness. Not quite rage, just dissatisfaction, because you always want to fix things, but you wouldn't be able to fix this."
It's a funny way of putting it. It's a funny way of thinking about him, too, of calling him easy and saying she knows him in a single breath. "I'm not that easy now," he protests, hoping she understands that he means that she doesn't know him that well, yet.
"I guess I still have time to figure that out." There's a slight uplift at the end, making it sound as if she's asking a question.
"Yeah," he says, "I guess you do."
:::
She comes to see him the night before the next full moon. He finds her standing outside his wing of the hospital, her foot tapping in impatience and her arms crossed.
"Want to get food?" she asks, grabbing onto his wrist and pulling him down the hall without waiting for a response.
"I can't leave St. Mungo's, though," he tells her, willingly following along. "I'm on call."
Lily veers left, toward the lift. "The cafeteria it is, then."
"Sorry for the food," he mutters as they step into the lift, and she laughs.
"Honestly, it's probably better than the tinned soup I was planning on cooking at my flat tonight."
"It's definitely better than that." He makes a face. "Unless it was tomato?"
She shakes her head, red hair everywhere. "Split pea. Disgusting."
"Gross."
"I know you're mostly just saying that, but it really is very gross. You can't know until you've had it every night for a week how incredibly unpleasant split pea soup actually is."
"Why would you do that, eat only soup for a week?" They're at the entrance to the cafeteria, and a few healers glance over at them, eyebrows raised. They recognise Lily from her stay at St. Mungo's, and from the frequency with which her photograph makes the Prophet, and Teddy can feel their curiosity in the way they watch him and Lily as they move to pick up plastic trays.
"Work has been insane, and it's all I had in," she says, and then launches into a story about a snake who would not allow her to place him in the crate they had been planning to use to transport him back to Brazil, which was where he had been born.
"So then," she says, cutting into a steaming slice of lasagne, "I had to go to Brazil to drop him off, and when I left again he tried to come with me, wound himself around my ankle and told me that he would make a good pet. It was supremely creepy and also sort of adorable." She takes a bit of the lasagne and sighs. "But I had to leave him there, because not-adopting-snakes is sort of one of the guidelines of my job."
"He must have been heartbroken." Teddy smiles as she rolls her eyes.
"He's a literal snake, he'll get over it."
"Was Brazil fun, though?"
"I don't really know. It was hot and stupidly humid. My hair still hasn't recovered." She tries to smooth down some frizz. It springs back up. "But it seemed pretty. Very green. I sort of just shoved the snake off of me and got out of there."
"Only you," Teddy shakes his head.
"Snakes actually try to get me to adopt them pretty regularly. I think they like talking to someone." She shivers and runs her hand over her arm, where the scar from the snakebite sits beneath her shirtsleeve. "This one was obviously a problem child." And then she favours him with another bright smile and tells him about James's most recent girlfriend, a witch whom Lily really does not seem to like.
It's odd, Teddy thinks, how, even though she seems so ashamed of being a parseltongue, she also so clearly loves it. He thinks of how it's so unbearably difficult to love something you think you shouldn't.
:::
Lily comes to the Potter/Weasley midsummer party wearing a blue tank-top that puts enough skin on display to kill Teddy, if he were easily defeated. It also displays the twisting new tattoo that curves down and around the skin of her forearm, an intricate snake inked in black and green. It is fascinating. From the way Harry is staring at it, his heart has stopped and is having difficulty restarting.
Ginny breaks the silence first. "That is—well, hell, Lil. That is new."
Louis bursts out laughing. James and Albus inch nearer to Lily, and Al takes her arm in his hands and twists it slowly, so he can see the way the snake turns.
"Are its fangs...?" James begins, and then snorts, the sound somewhere between amusement and horror. "Its fangs end on the scars."
"Or you could say they start there," Albus points out, leaning close and peering at the tattoo. "Well, that's really something, Lily."
"I like it," Roxie says.
"Me too," Dom leans over Lily's shoulder to stare at it. "What do you think, Ted?" She lifts her head and turns to where he's standing beside her. He feels as if the attention of the whole family is focused suddenly on him. Lily twists her head to look at him.
"I like it, too," he says, and he does. It seems like Lily is doing something to own her identity. Even if she's not happy with it, it's more apparent, more honest, than anything she's done so far.
"Do you?" she asks. There's a catch in the question, something he doesn't understand.
He meets her gaze. "If you like it, I do. I think it looks good. Snakes are really interesting, very clever." He glances up at Harry, who is still staring like someone has turned his world around. "Don't you think, Harry?"
"I've always liked them," Harry agrees after a long, silent moment, during which James glares at Teddy and Albus shoves his shoulder. "Well, not always," he rushes to correct, "just, since around the end of the War. And when I was little." He smiles, his eyes staring far off. "God, I loved snakes when I was little." He turns the smile to Lily, and says, "It's a good tattoo, kiddo. Although I wish you had told us about it beforehand. It's a bit much to be blindsided with."
But Lily is staring at him, her eyes wide and wet with surprised tears, and so she doesn't really respond. She just blinks fast and pulls her arm away from Albus, and then says, voice a little shaky, "What's for eating?"
Teddy finds her by the pond in the back garden later that evening. He resists saying that he told her so, just sits down in the grass beside her and takes her arm in his hands. He runs his fingers over the tattoo, pays special attention to the two silvery scars at the very end (or start) of the black pointed fangs.
"It's amazing," he tells her, as she sighs at the touch of his hands. "It really is. It's sort of beautiful."
"Thank you, I think." She presses her head against his shoulder and they stare at the waterbugs flicking over the surface of the water. "I didn't expect—my dad's reaction. I didn't expect that."
"No," Teddy agrees. "I suppose you didn't."
"I've spent so long hating myself. And since leaving school, since getting to know you, since James and Al and Louis have been so supportive, I don't know, I've started wondering—do you think I have reason to?"
"I think you have absolutely no reason to hate yourself." He takes her hand in his, weaves their fingers together.
"But then why have I been, all this time?"
He shrugs. "We can't help how we feel. Feelings are irrational and often stupid and often they go in the wrong direction. Maybe you felt like that because you wanted to hate Voldemort, but he's not here to hate. Maybe because you were afraid, and that fear made you angry. There are probably a lot of reasons, but none of them—absolutely none—meant that you should feel that way about yourself. They just explain why you do. And the fact that you do, that's not something to feel guilty over, Lil. It just is. It just is, and the fact that you want to change it, that's something to feel good over."
Lily's hand is sweaty in his. He turns to look at her, their faces close together.
"Does it scare you, that I have bits of Voldemort in me?"
"I don't believe that you have bits of Voldemort in you." He shakes his head. "I don't believe that at all. I believe that you have bits of Harry in you, and bits of Ginny in you, and a lot of utterly fascinating Lily in you. I think you have Muggle in you, and magic in you, and some hate and some love. I think you have," he sighs, because this sounds ridiculous, but she still doesn't look like she believes him.
"I think you have," he continues, "rainstorms and lightning and paper and iron and fire in you. And that you're astonishingly brave and amazingly fragile, and that you are a whole, incredible person, with whole, incredible worlds inside of you. I think if you came across a bird with a broken wing you'd try to fix it, and if you came across a snake with a broken fang you'd try to fix that, and that those are not at all different, they aren't. I think that once you see that, you'll realise that what you are, above all, is good."
She has tears in her eyes, again. "Not to myself, I'm not," she says.
"No," he agrees. "But that doesn't mean that that won't change."
"You think I could be okay, someday?"
"I think you're already on your way."
She leans her head back onto his shoulder and settles there, her hand in his and the pond water lapping before them.
:::
A few days later an owl taps at the window to the kitchen in his flat. He undoes the latch and pushes it open. The owl flops inside and deposits a coffee-marked envelope on the table, then hoots at him and snatches a soggy orange peel from the counter by the sink before flying back out the window.
"Weird bird," Teddy mutters, drying his soapy hands on a dishtowel and reaching for the envelope. It has his name scrawled on the front in Lily's handwriting. He's suddenly nervous.
He tears it with shaking hands and a lined piece of paper falls out.
Teddy—
You have oceans inside of you.
That makes no sense, okay. Because oceans are big and rough and so indecipherable and they hold so much, and you—you are big only to those who know you, and you are not so much indecipherable as incredible, like the more I find out about you the deeper into you I want to sink, and you are not rough, you are the opposite of rough. It's just—when I'm with you I think of oceans, because when I'm standing by an ocean I feel calm and okay, and when I'm with you I feel calm and okay. And I know, from the way you've been acting, that you're not hanging out with me in order to help me. You aren't there to help me, but you're helping me anyway. Like an ocean isn't there for me, but it helps me anyway. And God, this really makes no sense. I'm sorry. I'll try another metaphor.
Another metaphor is: I think of you and I think of blankets and winter days, and how nice it is to curl up in layers of wool while snow falls outside and your nose is cold but every other bit of you is warm. The cold air keeps you grounded and the warmth keeps you happy and to me you are blankets on a snowy day.
And you're also just genuinely good. It's strange to me that you called me good the other day, because in my head that's always been you. Even when I thought you hated me, were judging me, were disappointed in me, even then I knew that you were good. And now that I know you better (I think I do, anyway, I hope you would agree) I cannot shake that feeling of inexplicable goodness that you give off. Like if I went to you with anything you'd be some sort of support for me. And I want to thank you for that.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I'm sorry I didn't say anything to you the other day. There may have been a moment there and I may have ruined it. I think that I want you so much closer than you are, and you're already closer to me than anyone has ever gotten. (Well, closer in a different way to Al and James and Louis and Hugo and Ris and the others.)
I think what I'm trying to say is that I want to be able to touch you whenever I want to and I want to be able to tell you that I love you without it being followed by an awkward silence and I want to be able to say that I am trying and I want you to be trying alongside me.
I think I'm also trying to ask you to come with me tomorrow (today?) and tell my parents about me. I think I'm ready for that.
Love,
Lily
P.S. I'm a little bit drunk right now, so I'm going to wait till morning to send this. I hope I still have the balls to send this in the morning because right now it seems like something you need to hear so I imagine it probably is, but like I said, there was wine involved, so I don't know if it's something I actually want you to know. I think it should be, because it's nice and it's about you, so obviously you should know it. Anyway. Fingers crossed I'm ballsy enough to send it.
Teddy reads the letter twice, then sets it down on his table with shaking hands and crosses the room to the fireplace. He tosses a handful of Floo powder in and goes straight to the Potters' house.
Lily isn't there yet, so he helps Harry clean up his and Ginny's breakfast dishes and starts a pot of coffee and tries very hard to calm his nerves so that they're not noticeable. He only starts breathing again when they hear the front door open and Lily's voice hesitant from the front hall, "Mum, Dad? Are you home?"
"In the kitchen," Harry calls.
Ginny adds, "Teddy's here, too."
Lily takes a long time to make it to them, and by the time she's arrived Teddy's set out cups of coffee for everyone but Harry, who prefers tea, and has gotten Lily's parents to sit down while he places packaged biscuits on a plate. Lily looks at him from the doorway, and he smiles at her, a slow, hesitant smile, because drunk letters are not always entirely believable.
She smiles back, her bright one, and it actually reaches her eyes, this time.
"Come sit, Ted," she says, "Please."
She takes the plate of biscuits from him and places it on the table, and then takes his hand and makes him sit in the chair beside her. She doesn't let go. Her parents stare at them.
"Are you two...?" Ginny begins.
"Dating?" Harry finishes, in case they need clarification.
"Sort of," Lily says. She glances at Teddy, who cannot keep the grin from his face. "I think."
"Yeah," he agrees. "Yeah, we are."
"Okay. Well." Ginny looks at Harry. He is smiling at her, a real, genuine smile, Teddy can tell from the way the corner creases his laugh-lines into existence. "No need to look so nervous. That's good news, as far as we're concerned."
"That's not actually," Lily begins. Her nails are biting into Teddy's hand. He stays silent. "That's not what I want to talk to you about."
"Whatever it is, Lil, there's no reason to look so scared," Harry says. "We love you, no matter what, you know that."
She sighs, a breath holding years and years of sadness. "I have been lying to you. Pretty outrageously."
Ginny and Harry exchange a glance. "Okay," Ginny says slowly, "about what?"
"I only bartend on weekends. During the week, I'm—I work for the Ministry. It's sort of like curse-breaking? Except I help open old dark wizards' homes, so that the Ministry can get in there and, like, take away all of their paraphernalia."
Harry's hands are in fists on the table. "I know that department. I didn't know you were a part of it."
"No, I wouldn't let them tell you."
"Why not?" Ginny asks, her voice high. "Why wouldn't you want us to know?"
"It's to do with," Lily's hand, the one not gripping Teddy's, moves to cover the tattoo on the arm that disappears beneath the table, "it's to do with something I found out when I was still at school."
Harry's gaze has followed the movement of her hand, and he narrows his eyes. He parts his lips, looks about to speak, but Ginny says, "What, Lily? What could be so bad you didn't think you could tell us?"
"Parseltongue," she says, and suddenly there's a fit of spitting from Harry, a burst of low hisses that make Teddy a little uneasy. But Lily looks at him; for the first time since sitting down, she properly looks at her father.
She hisses back at him, and the sound is softer than Teddy was expecting it to be from her, softer and sadder and slower. Harry reaches across the table and lifts her hand from her arm, holds it tight.
"But," Ginny says, apparently unsurprised by Harry's outburst, "why would you keep that from us?"
"I thought, for the longest time...I sometimes still think, that it came from Voldemort. And so it would bring up bad memories and everything, and it also meant that I had a little bit of him in me, too. And it seemed so devastating to me, that after everything you and Dad and everyone had done to stop him, that he could still live on through Dad, through me. It seemed sick. So I didn't want to tell you, because I didn't want you to feel the way I had felt."
"Oh, Lily," Ginny says and Harry is shaking his head so fast that his greying hair is a blur.
"No, Lily."
"And Ted said that it was evidence of you, and not him, and I want to believe that. And I wanted to stop being so...so hard on myself about it, because it was exhausting from the start, and I wanted to tell you, and so here I am."
"It's not a bad thing, Lily. It's a magical thing, it's just a magical thing. And you're working miracles with it, aren't you? Making the world better? Christ." Harry drops his head in his hands. "I never wanted you to grow up to feel that way. Sick, like something inside of you is wrong."
Ginny and Teddy look at each other, and they push back from the table at once. "We'll be just outside," Ginny says. She squeezes Harry's shoulder as she passes him, and Teddy leans down and drops a kiss to Lily's hair.
"Just outside," he promises.
He and Ginny sit on the swing-set on the edge of the garden. "Does anyone else know?" Ginny asks. She sounds sad and old, and Teddy starts swinging, hoping she'll catch on and follow him. She does, although neither of them picks up much speed, because Ginny is still waiting for Teddy to respond.
"James and Albus and Louis. They've known for a while. I only found out recently."
"Did it make you love her more or less?" The question is meant to make him angry, but he understands how confused and scared she must be feeling, so it doesn't.
"It didn't change how I felt about her at all."
Ginny pushes her legs out and draws them in faster. "Okay. Thank you for being there for her."
"Of course." He follows Ginny's lead, and the two of them start swinging like they could almost take off, like they're almost flying.
They come back to the ground when Lily and Harry come out to the garden, both wiping tears from their cheeks, and then the four of them put together a picnic lunch that they eat down by the pond, during which nobody mentions Voldemort, but Lily does talk about her job a little, haltingly. It's something, though, and everyone knows that it is something important.
:::
She meets him in the cafeteria at work every night that week, and on Friday they go out for gelato after his shift.
It's a simple thing, after all of this, to kiss her. She has just dropped her empty dish into a rubbish bin and she is smiling, and he places his hands on her waist and kisses her there, on the crowded pavement, beneath the buzzing streetlamps. She tastes sticky and sweet, of hazelnut and stracciatella, and her lips are soft. She kisses him back, and the sigh she makes as they pull away at a catcall from some passerby sits perfect and right in his lungs.
"It's okay," she tells him, taking his hand. "We have time."
"Yeah," he says, "yeah, I guess we do."
A/N: Thank you for reading - I hope you enjoyed, and I very much appreciate reviews!